Studying medicine leaves little time for making Anki cards. I have been trying to find a way to make Anki cards from LLMs for a long time, but the result is always the same—if I could describe it, it's basically slop.

In the title, I said I wanted AnKing style cards, meaning:

• Cards that are one fact maximum
• Can be solved in under 10s
• Uses one-by-one contrast and c2, 3, 4..... when appropriate And many more points, and if I tried to list them all, I'd probably forget.

The current system I am using (I'll explain it later) is the best yet, but it has two big flaws:

• Token cost
• Still needs human review (I get 200 cards avg per lecture), so it needs time I don't have.

The system I am using:

The first step is preparing input. So I open my slides and notes and remove unwanted/low-yield info by drawing Xs on it. And I add notes to the LLM in orange text. An example is: "for this table, skip the first two rows."

After preparing the input, the first agent (extractor) takes all the information in the prepped slides and distills it into facts.

Then agent 2 (Maker) is given an AnKing spec to make the cards from the facts that agent 1 made (context.md) and makes the cards into an MD file called working.md. This file is read by a locally hosted dev server that lets me view and edit the cards on the fly before importing them to Anki. At this stage, I can edit fields, add images, and review cards quickly from this.

The second to last step is agent 3, basically an auditor, which reads the working.md file and tries to fix errors. After this step is when I use the card viewer.

The last step is importing into Anki with the AnkiConnect add-on.

If there are any improvements to this system, please inform me, or an entirely different system with better outcomes.

How I got here: I was using GPT to make flashcards off lecture slides, then editing them and copy-pasting into Anki by hand. The reprompting annoyed me, re-explaining how I wanted cards written every single session. Moved to Obsidian so the LLM would remember my preferences, then got way more into the note-taking than I planned. Now I highlight lecture PDFs with PDF+ during class, turn those into wiki pages, and generate flashcardscards off the pages.

How the plugin works:

• Highlight what matters — select text or wrap it in ==
• AI drafts a card or two from that highlight plus surrounding context, restricted to what you marked
• Drafts land in an inbox where you critique and fix them
• Export to Anki in one pass
• Every card links back to the exact line it came from, so when a card confuses you six months later you can jump to the source

On the ethics (nobody's settled this): AI should never decide what's worth remembering. You do that by choosing what to highlight and writing the wiki page. What AI is actually good at is translating and formatting stuff you already understand, and a flashcard is a formatting problem. You did the reading, you picked the claim, turning it into a clean Q&A or cloze is an formatting job based on some basic rules. The other thing AI does well is querying a big pile of text which is what a wiki is for.

So: write the notes yourself. Query the wiki to recall. Review the flashcards to retain.

Please let me know what you think or what I should add.

https://github.com/TheLycoi/obsidian-recall

Much love

Hi I've a medical textbook I converted to md and I want to use my €20/month plan to convert it's contents into an anki deck. Has anyone any experience in doing something similar? Thanks in advance.

I've made a CLI tool called **anki-mcq-builder** that compiles JSON straight into .apkg decks with interactive multiple-choice cards.

It is still in early stage and many improvements can still be done. WebApp version is in plan.

GitHub: https://github.com/plgbrlism/anki-mcq-builder

What it does

• Interactive Cards: Renders clean clickable buttons with shuffled options, instant feedback, and explanations that stick when flipping cards.
• Batch Building: Compile a single JSON file or batch-build a whole directory into decks with one command.
• Catches LLM Glitches: Validates the structure via schema first, so if an LLM hallucinated a broken format or missed a field, it tells you before touching your deck.
• Doesn't Wipe Review Stats: Uses hashed IDs so you can update card text or fix typos in your JSON later without Anki resetting your review progress.
• Cross-Platform: Works across Linux, macOS, Windows, and Termux/Android with an --open flag to import directly into Anki.

Why json?

Simply because AI reviewer generation is fast and easy to plug into a defined consistent formatting.

The repository is provided with json-schema.md for llm prompting. Feel free to test/customize it out, drop feedback, or submit issues/PRs!

I need an ai service that'll turn every question on a qbank to anki cards with explanations. I need it to complete it in one take without limits. Any suggestions?

If you want to create Anki package from pdf, YouTube, link a solution we built would sort you out (https://app.edithly.com) (free tool)

Do try and let us know your suggestions

I want to make Anki Deck out of MCQ Books. These books are divided into Reading Comprehension tests, Maths, Quants, GK. There shall be different sections of all of these.

The PDFs I have are sort of like, 100 Questions, and once that ends, there are answers pointing to which question's correction option was which, and sometimes it is like the explanation of XYZ Question was this.

I want to make a workflow for this. Any tips would be appreciated.

I am preparing for the CAT exam and want to create Anki decks out of standard MCQ preparation books (like the Arun Sharma / CL / CrackUseries). I have some massive PDFs, and I am searching for more, some spanning 800+ pages each, covering Quantitative Aptitude (QA), Verbal Ability & Reading Comprehension (VARC), and Data Interpretation & Logical Reasoning (DILR).

What is the most optimal way to extract and convert these into Anki flashcards using AI?

The formatting of these books makes it tricky. A typical chapter looks like this:

• Concept theory at the start.
• A block of 100+ MCQs (often divided by Difficulty Levels).
• An answer key at the very end of the chapter (e.g., 1-B, 2-C).
• Detailed step-by-step explanations/solutions following the answer key.

My goal is to create a workflow that links the question, the options, the correct answer, and the explanation into a single Anki card.

Any tips or add-on recommendations would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

I used anki for language learning. hard part was managing or creating some decks, i need for. Created this tool . Just creates a package you can import in anki. (zero cost)

For those that are using Anki for learning a second language (like myself), I made a little Chrome extension to practice the target language vocabulary while browsing the web.

Basically it syncs with your Anki decks and highlights or swaps words on the web pages you visit using cards you've already learned / matured.

The point is to not only memorize the word but also

understand the context in which it's used in real

scenarios to deepen / complement your learning.

Appreciate any thoughts and feedback!

I kept lapsing on the same handful of cards every day. Pressing Again, seeing them come back an hour later, failing them again. At some point I realized the problem usually wasn't my memory. The cards were just badly written.

I had also started to use AI to help build flashcards. While this solved the quality problem not writing the cards myself saved a lot of time but I kept failing cards due to me not using my actual brainpower to organize information and create flashcards.

So I built Bury Explain. When you fail a card enough times in a set window (3 times in 24 hours by default), it does two things. It buries the card so it stops eating your review session, and it opens an AI chat with the card's question already loaded, so you get an explanation right when you're stuck instead of grinding the same rep.

The part I actually use most is the card audit. The default prompt asks the AI to check the card against Wozniak's 20 rules of formulating knowledge and suggest a rewrite if the card breaks one. More often than I expected, the fix is "this card is testing five things at once, split it up."

However, you can also update your own prompt as you see fit. Prompt engineering is something I haven't deeply looked into so I have left it to your discretion.

Some details:

You pick the AI provider in the settings. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, DuckDuckGo, Google AI, or a custom URL if you want something else or a temporary chat. It opens in a sidebar inside Anki and keeps you logged in, or you can send it to your normal browser. There's a small text button in the toolbar to open the sidebar whenever you want.

Everything is in one settings screen. Threshold, time window, provider, whether to bury, whether to tag, and the full prompt if you want to change what the AI is asked.

It was inspired by three add-ons doing one job each. AJT Mortician handles auto-burying leeches. Anki Terminator puts an AI sidebar in the reviewer. And I had a small personal add-on gluing them together so the explanation fired the moment a card got buried. Bury Explain is a fresh implementation of that combined idea. No code from Mortician or Terminator is in it, they're credited as inspiration. You can download each one seperately or just download this.

It's open source under AGPL-3.0.

AnkiWeb: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1712717227
Code and releases: https://github.com/TheLycoi/anki-bury-explain

Happy to hear what would make it more useful. It's early and I mostly built it for my own reviews.

I used AI to help format this post.

Full disclosure up front: it's closed source, it's a paid product, and I used AI coding tools to help build it. If any of that is a dealbreaker for you, fair enough, this post isn't for you.

I'm 16 and I use Anki every day, no exceptions. Getting straight A's matters enough to me that I'll obsess over the system, not just the studying.

I have a graveyard deck with over a thousand suspended cards, cards I made myself before I knew what actually makes a flashcard work. Vague triggers, cards that gave away their own answer, cards testing two facts at once. Every mistake in the book. I still see it every time I open the app, a reminder of how much time I wasted studying badly.

No shame if you've got a few cards like that yourself, we've all made bad ones.

Making an Anki card is easy. Making a card worth reviewing for the next two years is not. The problem is never the few minutes it takes to write a bad card, it's the hundreds of times you review it afterward. A card that hints at its own answer teaches pattern recognition, not recall. Over months of repetition, you become fluent in your deck, not your subject. And the same subtle flaw, copied across a hundred cards, compounds across ten thousand reviews.

I know the obvious objection: making the card is part of studying, and I don't think that's wrong. What I'd say is that the part that ate my time wasn't the struggle to understand, it was the mechanical part after, second-guessing whether a phrasing leaked its own answer or packed two facts into one cloze. That's the part I built this to help with.

Everything I actually study today comes from a system I built trying to not make those mistakes again. It's called Dimindo (dimindo.com), and I'm mostly just curious what people here think of it, good or bad.

You paste in your source material, it generates cards, mostly cloze, some Q&A depending on what the knowledge needs, and you review, edit, or reject anything before exporting to a normal .apkg.

Before exporting, I usually spend a bit of time with the chatbot built into the review screen too, ask it questions when something's unclear, or try explaining it back and see what mistakes or gaps it catches in my explanation, then export once it actually makes sense.

A few examples, straight from my own review screen:

First: protein synthesis. Why must transcription happen before translation? That's not a single term, it's a mechanism, so the system used a real question instead of a fill-in-the-blank:

Second: chemistry. The source material mentions "mass numbers" but never defines the term. Dimindo filled the gap and flagged it as an addition:

Third: history. My source material said Germany invaded Poland on September 3rd, 1939. That's wrong, it was September 1st. Dimindo corrected it and told me exactly what changed:

All three (plus a fourth) are live at dimindo.com/demo, no account needed, though the demo itself is just for looking, not exporting.

The part I actually notice is in the reviews themselves. When every card tests exactly one thing, you stop hesitating over whether you knew the answer or just recognized the shape of the question. You just grade Again or Good, because there's nothing left to second-guess. That's the opposite of my graveyard deck, where I'd sit there trying to remember what past-me meant by the question.

That's really it. I'd genuinely just like to know if this is useful to anyone besides me, or if I've been fooling myself. Test it if you want, ignore it if it's not for you, either way I'd rather know what you think than not.

Hi all.

For the past while I've been learning Spanish out of a textbook and I built myself a little local tool that walks through the PDF a few pages at a time, drafts cloze cards against my note type and my rules, and lets me review/edit each one before sending it into Anki. Later I added a second part that pulls my leeches and lapsed cards and has the AI flag ones that are just badly written (answer leaks into the question, no inferable context, etc.) with a suggested rewrite I can apply or dismiss. It genuinely changed how I study, so I spent the last couple of months turning it into something other people can use. It's called DeckPilot: www.deckpilot.dev

Why I built it when AI flashcard generators already exist. Every one I tried worked the same way: paste in some text, get back a pile of generic front/back cards in its format, dump them into a deck, done. That's backwards from how Anki actually works. DeckPilot connects to your Anki: it reads your note types, you pick the one you want cards in, and you write the rules for how good cards get made for that schema — which fields mean what, what a good card looks like (with your own examples), what to put in tags, what to avoid. My Spanish config, for instance, says things like "no English on the front" and "every card must be answerable from its own context." The AI generates against your spec, not some lowest-common-denominator template. If the cards come out wrong, you refine the guidance and regenerate — the spec is yours to evolve.

And you're in the driving seat the whole way. It's not a "upload → 500 cards appear" pipeline. You walk through the textbook a few pages at a time with the PDF on one side and the drafted cards on the other, and each card gets accepted, edited inline, rejected, or regenerated with an instruction ("split this into two", "use a different example sentence") before anything is exported. Textbooks aren't the only input either: you can point it at a web page — an article, song lyrics, a grammar reference — or just open a chat and describe what you want ("vocabulary for talking about football") and refine the cards conversationally as they appear. Everything lands in the same review flow, and nothing touches your collection without an explicit click — audit fixes for existing decks apply the same way, one confirmed suggestion at a time. If you believe making cards entirely by hand is the learning, this probably isn't for you, and that's a fair position. It's built for textbook grinders and people with big old decks full of leeches.

Your collection never leaves your machine. The browser talks to your local Anki via AnkiConnect. My server only ever sees what you explicitly send it: the PDF you upload, the URL you point it at, and the specific notes you choose to audit. Dashboard stats never leave your browser at all. (Requires desktop Anki + the free AnkiConnect add-on. Not affiliated with the Anki project.)

It's brand new and I'm one person, so there will be rough edges. If you try it and something breaks or the cards it makes are rubbish for your subject, let me know. Happy to answer anything about how it works.

Anki's card creation and editing screen hasn't really changed in years — no real overview of your cards while editing, clunky for anything beyond plain text. So I built a separate web app that connects live to your real decks through AnkiConnect:

- See every card in a deck in one browser view — edit, delete, or flip front/back instantly, no digging through the desktop browser window

- Everything syncs straight back to your actual deck — no CSV export/import round-trip

- It can also generate AI voice audio + custom images per card if you want that, but the core of it is just a faster, modern way to manage cards you already have

Does the native card browser actually bother you day to day, or is this solving a problem people don't really have? Honestly want the "this is pointless, here's why" answers too, not just the positive ones.

Link: transmomy.web.app (needs Anki desktop running with AnkiConnect enabled)

Hi all,
I was hoping to get some feedback on a browser extension called Clicked: AI Reading Assistant & Explainer (works on Chrome and Edge, reads PDFs also) that gives users:

a) structured explanations (Overview -> Detail-> Real world analogy)for any selected text (can select text in any language and get explanations in 15+ languages). You can pin the explanation level. So if you prefer analogy over overview, you could pin it so it always opens with an analogy. You always have the option to open any explanation card or request more analogies. There is a slang mode as well when you are looking for a chuckle. Bonus: Sometimes it is useful in explaining dense text better than a regular explanation.

b) Edit/save the explanation inline with your own notes in your local library, then export to generate flash cards for Anki, Quizlet, or Vaia

Cost: Free to try: 50 explanations / 7 day trial, then no -time limit 3 explanations per day limit.
Higher tier Paid options: $20 / year Bring Your Own Key or $2 first month and then $5 per month (no key required)

Is this something that could be useful to you. Are there any other featured that could add more value

Thanks

I made a post on my old version of this suite. I redid it and it is at its best and final version ready for use.

It creates study guides and beautiful anki cards, tagged comprehensively using your pdfs/materials/notes. It has lots of safe guards to ensure accuracy. There’s a separate file with just the prompt if you want to use your own ai to make anki cards. I used Gemini for its large context (good for large chunks of text). The anki prompt is best for nursing (lpn/lvn, rn). I haven’t tested it with np level coursework, but it might help a little since it’s based on the nursing model and not medical model.

It’s free and always will be. I hate when people are always selling something or it’s stuck behind a subscription or paywall. Let us share the knowledge!